Prison mirrors the society of which it forms a part, albeit in exaggerated form. Thus, we can gain a glimpse into how structures of power main-tain themselves by looking at how power is sustained within our crim-inal justice system. Violence, the threat of violence, certainly plays an outsized role in propping up the authority of the few who rule over the many. Yet behind that force lies isolation, misinformation, bureauc-racy, contradictory rules, contradictory interpretation of rules, sources of confusion that throw off-kilter too many who might otherwise chal-lenge the authority of those who sit in power. Survival all too often is dependent on accepting the prevailing common sense needed to get by; it is that which reinforces compliance to injustice.
I was arrested in late 1997 and spent over three years in county jails and federal prison transit centers – before during and after my trial – until I finally was sent to my first “home away from home,” a federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. I assumed that daily life would be dictated by clear, strict rules, that there would be immediate conse-quences for any violation. To some extent that was true but reality – as always – proved far more complex. There are indeed many rules, some-times sharply defined, more often opaque and vague. Yet the fact is, in prison, as in any place where a large number of people are gathered together, folks create informal rules of behavior that manage most day-to-day situations; a reality which guards for the most part accept (without acknowledgement) for it is a reality that they depend upon. But power lies outside those arrangements. Capricious enforce-ment of rules means that it was impossible to be in compliance with every rule because one simply didn’t know what they truly were or when they would be enforced. In consequence, almost anyone can be found in violation of something any time a guard (or someone higher up the food chain) so decides. That lack of clarity furthers the disempowerment of those who are already without power. Making all this worse – and taking some time to get used to – is that rule changes are never acknowledged as such. Once a new rule is enforced, the fiction is maintained that it had always been so. The result: a per-manent sense of insecurity, of disorientation.
Dreaming of Freedom in Kafka’s Castle is my attempt to describe the sensibility of living within this world of named and nameless rules as part of my own effort to learn how to navigate my way through the years that lay ahead. Kafka’s novel described the feel of our prison system perfectly as an indictment of faceless authority. Yet his novel was not about prison, it was about living during the last days of a dying empire, an empire clinging to life by destroying the lives of those who lived within its borders, those who were to be sacrificed on the altar of war.
Which returns me to what I wrote above, prison serves as an exag-gerated reflection of the ills of the society of which it forms a part. I was not unmindful that the mood described speaks to what we as a country are experiencing. The enormous expansion of our prison system accompanied the destruction of jobs that resulted from corporate free trade agreements, privatization of public services, deregulation and the whole panoply of changes that define neoliberalism. In its place we have indebtedness, precariousness, a loss of any sense of security, of the ability to predict and have a say over the type of life each of us tries to build. Simultaneously, public speech and mainstream media talked in language ever less connected to the reality being described. This opened the door to the appeal of MAGA demagoguery and the danger of fascism which will not be easily overcome. It is why we must always seek clarity amidst the confusion, assert our humanity and bond with others as we face our present, determine our future – just as do those caught in the grip of prison seeking, creating a pathway forward.
